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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Even within the restriction of 10 minutes for speeches--of which I remind the House--it will be difficult to fit in every right hon. and hon. Member who is seeking to catch my eye. I appeal for short speeches.
5.38 pm
Mr. Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield): I realise that I have been in the House for a long time. When I was a university teacher--when I worked for a living--I used to lecture about the great value of Opposition days, which are at the centre of our parliamentary democracy. As I listened to the opening speech from the hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), I wondered whether anyone outside who believed in parliamentary democracy, let alone education, would value this debate very highly.
The opening speech could have set us off on the right footing. It could have been creative and full of insight. Fortunately, we are bringing about changes to the procedures of the House, with pre-legislative inquiries and the on-going work of Select Committees. That allows us to talk more constructively about education across the House.
I want to go through a quick checklist of how well the Government are meeting their obligations under the manifesto and the mandate to prioritise education. I want to give marks out of 10, some good and some bad. The hon. Member for Maidenhead was a very constructive member of the Education and Employment Committee and knows something about the subject, so it is surprising that she could not bring herself in this debate to talk about what we have in common.
The Government have adopted an approach that one would have thought would be dear to the heart of the Conservative party. They used good business methods, recognising that we must organise education in a more businesslike way, with achievable targets towards which all the stakeholders in the business can work together. That is fundamental tomorrow's company stuff about which anyone who has worked in the private sector knows.
Some of the successes came because the Government threw away some things that our party used--more in rhetoric than reality--to believe in, and took a realistic stance, looking at the problems pragmatically and solving them with any best technique that was available. I would have expected a little more frankness and honesty from the Opposition on that.
There is a problem. The Government came to power desperate to make changes. There was a huge backlog of neglect, stretching back well beyond the previous 18 years. We all used to accept that education was essentially for the elite. The Conservative party was more comfortable with that than us, but we all accepted that only a few people would be educated to a high level and that many would be looked after until they were 14--or subsequently 15 and 16--and would then get a job.
I remember cycling to school past factories displaying notices stating, "Hands Wanted". They wanted hands, not brains. That is a thing of the past. We cannot have an educational elite, be it 3, 5 or 30 per cent. of the population. All our work force and all our people must be encouraged to attain the highest levels of education and skill. I think that the Opposition accept that fact, too, although very reluctantly.
It is not surprising that an incoming Labour Government rushed at the target. Of course they did not get everything right--what Government do?--but some of the measures have been highly successful. Let us consider the Ofsted report. The figures were mentioned by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis). We have had great success in helping pupils in the early years and through to 11. That positive result means that we can consider more seriously what is happening for those from 11 to 14. There are serious deficiencies in that area. The transition to secondary school has proved difficult for some.
The difficulties are not only in problematic schools. I get sick of the terminology. We can call them failing schools, more difficult schools or challenged schools--we know which ones we are talking about. One problem is that the Government devise a strategy to do something about the most challenged schools and are not too clear that it might not be the right management strategy for what we call coasting schools--the 40 per cent. that are not getting worse or better in a hurry but need to be encouraged to achieve higher standards. That is the problem in the 11 to 14 sector.
In the difficult 14-plus sector, the Government's joined-up thinking has come later. It has taken time. Hon. Members know my old hobby horse about having too much of an academic education and constantly making those without the obvious academic abilities feel like second-class citizens. They do not get the high grades and the illustrious results and are made to feel failures throughout their education. Tackling that, especially at 14-plus, is something to which the Government have begun to set their hand. It will take time, but it is important that the Government do better. The match of skills and education is important, because they go together and should be considered together.
All of us who care about education are worried that too much emphasis is placed on driving basic standards up--increasing literacy and numeracy--while flair, creativity and imagination can fly out of the window. We must get the balance right.
I disagree strongly with the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough because I believe that performance- related pay, if introduced in the right way, must be right. Performance-related pay works in every other aspect of human endeavour that I know of, so why should teachers be different? I would also like to see performance-related pay--and better pay--in higher education, because if we are to maintain world-class standards in world-class institutions that compete globally, we have to do something radical quickly, before our higher education system is endangered.
Of all the aspects of education I have mentioned, I am most worried about higher education. We have not yet reflected and asked what will be the effects of too much standardisation and too much reliance on the state. We do not allow for diversity and creativity in higher education. They are most important if we are to provide the high-quality intellectuals on whom the nation depends.
I have a wish list. We must be cautious about the sort of pragmatism that always seems to lead to the private sector being invited in. Yes, the private sector can do a good job, but the expertise in the private sector is thinly spread and there are few firms around. Why cannot we build on the idea of the public sector producing superb administrators who are also managers who know education at a fundamental level? We could have a corps--a concept familiar in France and some other countries--from the public sector, with a good managerial ethos, to do the job.
We must ensure that we develop a methodology for breaking into the culture of low expectations in education. What strikes me from all the literature that I have read since becoming Chairman of the Education and Employment Committee is the lack of success with parents and how few parents we get through to and engage. I hate it when people say, "Well, parents do not turn up to the annual meeting." We have to have a strategy that engages parents and the home situation if we are to build on some of the fine work that we have done in early-years education. I have tried to bring some balance to the debate. There are some ticks and some crosses and some must-do-betters on the Government's record, but that is true of any Government.
5.48 pm
Mr. Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood): The central charge against the Secretary of State is simple. For three years, we have had relentless activism. He has abolished grant-maintained schools, he has introduced measures that threaten the future of grammar schools, he has reasserted the comprehensive theory and he has abolished the assisted places scheme. He has done a whole host of things, but the one thing that he has not done is reform the one aspect of the administration and structure of our school system that cries out for reform. That is the system of funding individual schools in such a way as to give sufficient freedom to the heads and the teachers to meet the needs of the local communities the schools are there to serve.
Our funding system for individual schools is hopelessly opaque and is, in many cases, entirely perverse in its consequences. It allows Ministers to make decisions for whose effect they do not have to accept responsibility because the machinery is so complex that they understand it no more than do teachers or parents.
I am pleased to say that the chief inspector of schools made it clear in this year's annual report that he largely agreed with that analysis. He wrote:
- "We do not, as yet, have a transparent and educationally defensible mechanism for the equitable devolution of resources from central government to LEAs and from LEAs to schools. We should."
Earlier, the Secretary of State noted that the present SSA funding system was the creation of the previous Government. That is true, historically, although it is also true that the SSA system is a close cousin of the system of rate support grants that preceded it. The present system grew up under Governments of both major parties over many years. We shall not make progress on this fundamental matter by seeking to score party political points. I want Ministers to come to the Dispatch Box and accept responsibility for introducing a fundamental reform of a system whose time has long since passed.
I shall illustrate my argument from the local perspective of a Leicestershire Member of Parliament. People in Leicestershire do not need to understand the elaborate algebra of the formula to understand the stark consequences of that formula in their county. My hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) mentioned the Government's SSA recommendations for Leicestershire county council. I invite my constituents--and the House--to compare what would happen in Leicestershire if those recommendations were adopted, with the circumstances of the not dissimilar authority of East Sussex.
I do not doubt that East Sussex faces its own problems with funding for schools, but it enjoys relatively more generous SSAs than Leicestershire. The last time that I visited East Sussex, it did not feel like a county in immediate need of regional assistance, but the computers tell us that the Government believe that education there should cost £270 per pupil per annum more than in Leicestershire. I do not understand that disparity, and I do not expect my constituents to.
However, the comparison with Lambeth is even more stark. I accept that deprived inner-city areas face extra costs in delivering essential social services, but I do not accept that there is anything inherent in the state of Lambeth that means that education provision should cost 75 per cent.--or nearly £2,000--more per pupil there each year than in Leicestershire. I accept the principle that education may cost more in Lambeth, but I certainly do not accept the result that the formula currently determines.
I made it clear earlier that this problem cannot be resolved merely by tweaking the system. We need something that the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) touched on when he intervened on the Secretary of State. I listened to the hon. Gentleman's speech, and I agreed with almost none of it. Indeed, I fundamentally disagreed with the vast majority
of what he said--but then, he and I have argued about these matters in Standing Committee for more hours than either of us would have chosen.However, the hon. Gentleman said that the formula should relate the funding of individual schools to the number of their pupils and to their specific needs. He added that such a formula should be clear, accountable and comprehensible, and I warmly agree with him on both points. However, that proposition was fundamentally at variance with the larger case that he made in his speech, in which he argued for detailed LEA control of how individual schools go about their purposes. From the proposition that resources should flow to schools in a clear and accountable fashion it follows naturally that head teachers, staff and governors should be encouraged to be responsible for the use of resources once they reach a school.
I warmly agree with the ideas advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead for free schools financed by a formula that is clear and accountable. That would give head teachers and governors the confidence that their institutions would be fairly funded. It would also assure parents that their voices mattered in the running of schools. Most important, it would give pupils confidence that the professionals in the education world had the freedom to use resources to meet the needs of pupils in the best way possible.
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